The day after the White Sox won the American League pennant, native Chicagoan John Lent may have been the only executive in New York to start a meeting by asking, “How about those White Sox?”
The response was something less than a nuanced appreciation for the hitting prowess of first baseman Paul Konerko.
“I was met with complete, stony silence,” said Lent, 53, a vice president at Scholastic Inc., the children’s book publisher, and lifelong Sox fan. “I don’t think they had any clue what I was talking about.”
The South Siders may be in their first World Series in 46 years, but New Yorkers couldn’t understand why the rest of the country wasn’t fixated on the baseball drama that had been occupying their attention: Would Yankees owner George Steinbrenner look for another manager? After all, current manager Joe Torre hasn’t put together a championship team in five whole years.
“Before they clinched the pennant, I don’t think you could find many New Yorkers who could tell you where the White Sox played,” said Lent, who grew up on the South Side and has remained true to the team despite living in Yankees territory for 24 years. “It just shows you what parochial fans New Yorkers are.”
That was borne out by an exchange on Craig’s List, the interactive Web site where people peddle everything from sofas to sports opinions. A posting that asked, “Are there any White Sox fans in New York?” garnered this response: “None. Absolutely zero.”
Another posting predicted that this year’s World Series would be the “greatest WS that no one ever saw.”
The rest of the site’s chatter was given over to musings about the four pitchers in the series who once had worn Yankee pinstripes:Orlando Hernandez and Jose Contreras of the Sox; and Astros Andy Pettitte and Roger Clemens of the Astros.
This east-of-the-Hudson myopia even prevails in Washington Heights, the predominantly Dominican neighborhood in upper Manhattan. The White Sox have yet to catch on there despite the fact that eight players are Hispanic and manager Ozzie Guillen is Venezuelan.
“In this area there are not too many Venezuelan people,” said Jose Mateo, 33, owner of Peligro Sports, a sports apparel shop. “Everybody follows his own country. A couple of years ago, Sammy Sosa and the Cubs were big for us.”
Ex-Cub Sosa, like neighborhood favorites Manny Ramirez of the Red Sox and Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees, is Dominican. So are four White Sox–Juan Uribe, Timo Perez, Pablo Ozuna and Damaso Marte–but they lack the star power of Ramirez and Rodriguez.
A visitor asked a group of men gathered outside a corner grocery Friday what they thought of the White Sox. The men, who were playing dominoes on a folding card table, looked up briefly, shrugged, and returned to their game.
Even so, Mateo is ready for the series. Lined up neatly on a shelf are several dozen White Sox caps with World Series insignias, available for $26. “I’m going to sell them, but it’s going to take awhile,” he said.
In a city as large as New York, however, there are bound to be at least a few fans of any team whose allegiance is a matter of choice, not birth.
Peter Nicholas, 48, is that rare creature–a native New Yorker and White Sox fan. Nicholas, a writer who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, was so happy when the Sox won the pennant that he went in search of a Chicago newspaper marking the event.
Nicholas dates his enthusiasm for the Sox to 1964, when his parents took him to the South Side to visit family. He walked around the old Comiskey Park and heard stories about the stars of the 1959 team.
The Yankees weren’t much of a team during the late ’60s and well into the 1970s, so Nicholas became a White Sox fan.
“Those teams were a lot like this year’s team,” he said. “This year’s team is a classic White Sox team–a throwback to the 1960s when pitchers pitched complete games and defense, bunting and moving runners over was really prized.”
In Cooperstown, N.Y., home the Baseball Hall of Fame, the reaction to the White Sox was also subdued, but for diplomatic reasons. Asked if the baseball shrine had any White Sox fans among its ranks, Jeff Idelson, vice president of communications, chuckled.
“We love all 30 teams equally around here,” he said coyly.
He noted, however, an encouraging sign that America is on a steep learning curve about the Sox: The most frenzied folks at the Hall of Fame in the past few days have been the library researchers. Idelson described the number of research requests about the Sox from across the country as “just massive.”
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